Software

To complement the EXT4, XFS, Btrfs, and F2FS benchmark results that were published yesterday from the Linux 3.11 kernel and its predecessors, here are some Btrfs tuning benchmarks on the Linux 3.11 kernel with various performance-sensitive Btrfs mount options being tried.

Along with benchmarking the AMD A10-6800K "Richland" APU on Linux and its Radeon HD 8670D graphics, I provided some GCC compiler tuning benchmarks for this AMD APU with Piledriver cores. The latest Linux testing from the A10-6800K is a comparison of GCC 4.8.1 to LLVM/Clang 3.3 on this latest-generation AMD low-power system.

On Friday I delivered the first benchmarks of Ubuntu's Unity desktop running on XMir -- the X.Org Server compatibility layer for talking to the Mir Display Server. Those benchmarks showered there was noticeable performance overhead to running XMir with Intel's graphics driver. Later benchmarks showed XMir 2D performance was also negatively affected. In this article are benchmarks looking at the XMir performance with the Nouveau driver.

Earlier today I delivered the first benchmarks of Ubuntu's Unity 7 running over XMir to run the current X11 desktop atop the Mir Display Server via this compatibility layer. These benchmarks documented the performance impact of running OpenGL games when having to deal with XMir rather than just a clean X.Org Server running on the hardware. The extra step in the rendering process did result in a measurable performance impact, especially when the performance of the open-source Linux graphics drivers is already lower than their proprietary brethren. The benchmarks to now show illustrate that the 2D rendering performance also takes a hit when running Unity on XMir.

Complementing the earlier Phoronix article about optimized binaries for Intel Haswell CPUs via the -march=core-av2 Haswell compiler optimizations, in this article is a comparison of the GCC and LLVM/Clang compilers when targeting the new Core i7 4770K CPU. GCC 4.7.3, GCC 4.8.1, LLVM Clang 3.2, and LLVM Clang 3.3 were the tested compilers under Ubuntu Linux when seeing how well these different compilers optimized for Haswell.

While the Intel Haswell CPUs were just launched days ago, there's already quite a Linux story to them. The Haswell CPU is interesting and the performance is good, but there's still extra headroom to make especially when it comes to the graphics driver and performance relative to Intel's Windows driver. Even so, the Intel Haswell Linux support has already evolved a great deal.

In preparation for the upcoming release of LLVM 3.3, here is an extensive round of C/C++ benchmarks from GCC 4.8.0, LLVM Clang 3.2, and LLVM Clang 3.3-rc1 to look at the Linux compiler performance. Benchmarks happened from three different systems bearing Intel Core i7 3960X, AMD FX-8350, and Intel Core i3 3217U processors for a diverse look at the performance.

Building upon our F2FS file-system benchmarks from earlier in this week is a large comparison of four of the leading Linux file-systems at the moment: Btrfs, EXT4, XFS, and F2FS. With the four Linux kernel file-systems, each was benchmarked on the Linux 3.8, 3.9, and 3.10-rc1 kernels. The results from this large file-system comparison when backed by a solid-state drive are now published on Phoronix.